GUI back to basics

Quite intrigued the past several days by Jeff Atwood’s note about The Sugar UI and the icon-based interface that is hardwired into the XO laptop, the manifest of Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child inititiative.

I’m a fan of the idea that maybe there’s another way, at least for this controlled audience and set of budgetary constraints, to design a computer visual interface beyond the World of Windows that has dominated computing for the last 20 years. As Chris Anderson writes, constraints are good. Creativity is underrated. If the goal of these machines is to enable communication, thinking, and literacy among kids in developing countries, maybe Negroponte & Co. are on to something here.